Advances in Operations Research
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 512613, 15 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/512613
Research Article

Distributed Approach for Solving Time-Dependent Problems in Multimodal Transport Networks

Carlos Galvez-Fernandez,1 Djamel Khadraoui,1 Hedi Ayed,1,2 Zineb Habbas,2 and Enrique Alba3

1CITI, CRP Henri Tudor, 29 avenue John F.Kennedy, 1855 Luxembourg, Luxembourg
2LITA, University Paul Verlaine-Metz, Ile du Saulcy, 57045 Metz Cedex 1, France
3Departamento de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidade de Málaga, Campus Teatinos, 29071 Málaga, Spain

Received 10 April 2009; Accepted 19 June 2009

Academic Editor: Mhand Hifi

Copyright © 2009 Carlos Galvez-Fernandez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative approach for time-dependent multimodal transport problem. We describe a new graph structure to abstract multimodal networks, called transfer graph, which adapts to the distributed nature of real information sources of transportation networks. A decomposition of the Shortest Path Problem in transfer graph is proposed to optimize the computation time. This approach was computationally tested in several experimental multimodal networks having different size and complexity. The approach was integrated in the multimodal transport service of the European Carlink platform, where it has been validated in real scenarios. Comparision with other related works is provided.